The U.S. military and the White House are forcefully rejecting media claims that the Trump administration is planning to construct a massive $500-million American military base near Gaza, calling the reports flat-out false and “deeply misleading.”
The controversy erupted after Israeli outlets Ynet and Shomrim, relying on unnamed Israeli officials, claimed the United States was preparing an enormous installation along Gaza’s border to oversee postwar stabilization efforts.
The alleged plan suggested the facility would hold 10,000 people, including U.S. troops.
YNET News reported:
The United States is planning to build a large military base in Israel’s Gaza border region, according to an exclusive report by Shomrim. Israeli officials familiar with the preliminary plans said the facility would be used by international forces operating in Gaza to help maintain the cease-fire and could accommodate several thousand soldiers.
They estimated the project’s budget at roughly $500 million. In recent weeks, U.S. officials have advanced the proposal in discussions with the Israeli government and the IDF and have begun surveying potential locations in the Gaza periphery.
Security sources told Shomrim that the move represents a major shift in U.S. engagement. “It’s hard to overstate the significance of building such a base,” one official said. “Since the Six-Day War, Israel has sought to minimize international involvement in the territories.
The establishment of an American base on Israeli soil shows just how determined Washington is to be involved in Gaza and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The massive investment could also spark political debate in the United States. Many members of the Republican Party oppose expanding America’s overseas military footprint, especially amid domestic budget pressures and voter fatigue with foreign interventions.
The story snowballed further when Bloomberg News published a separate report revealing that the U.S. Navy circulated a request for information (RFI) regarding a temporary base of operations capable of supporting 10,000 personnel for a year.
The internal document asked contractors to provide cost estimates, noting it would be a self-sustaining site with 10,000 square feet of office space.
But Bloomberg explicitly stated the RFI was not:
- a formal request for bids
- a sign of an official Pentagon plan
- evidence that American forces would be deployed
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took the extraordinary step of publicly blasting the reporting, calling it careless and unfounded, according to TRT World.
“I checked with the highest levels of the United States federal government. This is not something the United States is interested in being engaged in,” Leavitt told reporters.
She revealed she directly confronted the reporter from Bloomberg who authored the original story.
“I had a conversation directly with the reporter who wrote this article, and this article was based on a single piece of paper, an inquiry that somebody in the Department of Navy made about an idea that may happen in the future. And this reporter deemed that as an official plan and ran with the story that the United States is looking into it.”
Leavitt emphasized that President Trump opposes deploying U.S. troops to Gaza, noting the administration is focused on brokering peace, not inserting American personnel into another foreign conflict.
“We’ve made great peace. We’ve made great progress with the peace plan in Gaza, and we want to continue to see that move forward,” she said.
“I put a comment in that story for a reason, and sometimes we see reporters take a piece of paper like this and and just deem it as official policy and sometimes that misleads people a little bit.”
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) also forcefully denied sensational reports from Israeli outlets claiming that the United States was preparing to build a $500-million military base near Gaza.
The alleged facility was framed as part of Washington’s role in postwar “stabilization” following the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
CENTCOM says it’s nonsense.
“Reports of the establishment of a U.S. military base near Gaza are inaccurate,” CENTCOM spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins said in a statement to Newsweek. “To be clear, no U.S. troops will be deployed into Gaza. Any reporting to the contrary is false.”
The post U.S. Military SHUTS DOWN Reports of $500 Million Gaza Base for 10,000 Personnel — Insists No American Troops Will Be Deployed appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.